Helpful Ways (Hopefully) to Think About Sexual Abuse Prevention

By Joan Tabachnick & David Prescott

It’s no secret that ATSA has become increasingly focused on its role in preventing sexual abuse. Plenary addresses at the ATSA conference in the early and mid-2000s urged attendees to think about and describe themselves as involved in prevention efforts. Within recent years, ATSA changed its name to the Association for the Treatment and Prevention of sexual abuse (while keeping the familiar ATSA acronym). At this year’s conference, prevention was central to nearly all the plenary addresses. Prevention is an idea whose time has come.

Within ATSA, we typically talk about prevention from a public health point of view.  We speak about primary, secondary, and tertiary prevention.  This powerful framing allows us to consider preventing sexual abuse both before and after someone has been sexually harmed.  It means that all of the work of ATSA and its members is prevention. 

However, we wanted to also offer insights into criminal justice approaches to prevention.  ATSA members are often inextricably tied to criminal justice systems and yet we don’t typically use criminal justice language and approaches when we talk about prevention. 

While there are huge similarities between public health and criminal justice approaches, the differences allow us to amplify other methods.  It can also be helpful to be “bilingual” in discussing these so that we can use the language that is most often familiar to the people we want to fully engage.  In particular, Welsh and Farrington identified two critical approaches to prevention within a criminal justice framework:  Situational prevention and Developmental prevention.  Within a public health framework and the ecological model, these two approaches would refer to the middle two layers – a relational approach and a community approach – both allowing for interventions before anyone is harmed and before someone engages in any problematic sexual behaviors. 

A recent article published by the US National Institute of Justice (and authored by Joan) dives into these criminal justice approaches to prevention: 

Briefly, the goal of situational prevention is to reduce the opportunities for a crime through systemic rather than individual strategies.  It explores the settings to look at factors that increase or decrease the likelihood of someone committing a crime.  It makes common sense.  Why put someone into a setting that encourages or at least does not discourage a behavior?  An extreme (but familiar) example is hiring someone with an active alcohol addiction as a bartender in their local bar.  Perhaps a more common example is to offer parking on campus to freshman, the most vulnerable on campus, furthest from their dorms.  This approach to sexual violence prevention has gained traction for many youth serving organizations as well as campuses. 

In very stark terms, ATSA looks at the complex differences in individuals who have engaged in sexually abusive behaviors or are at risk to do so.  Our mantra is to look at the wide diversity in the people who have committed a crime.  This approach also demands that we look at the environment surrounding that individual – not to take away their responsibility but to offer better opportunities to change their behaviors. 

Developmental crime prevention aims to stop the development of harmful sexual behaviors in children and adolescents in response to risk factors and risky behaviors.  What we do know is that children and teens are more receptive to interventions and will naturally have fewer static risk factors.  Because sexually problematic behaviors often emerge in early adolescence, this is a particularly promising age to intervene.  Programs have been developed to help identify children or teens with a higher number of risk factors.  Programs have also been developed to look at the family systems and intervene earlier to address a high number of risk factors within that family and thereby shifting the balance of risk and protective factors for those children and teens. 

Although further research is needed, both of these approaches have considerable evidence that these are promising practices for our field.  While we can all recognize that we can’t arrest ourselves out of sexual violence alone, having each of our various disciplines committed to preventing is a landmark shift in our approaches. 

Whatever our first language (criminal justice or public health), having a solid grasp of these prevention concepts can take us a long way on our journey towards healthier lives and safer communities for all!